The Longreads Blog

“Neil Young Comes Clean.” — David Carr, New York Times Magazine

More by Carr

A look at the women who work as “Internet cam girls,” and the criminal activity that may be occurring behind some of the cam networks:

‘Cam sites are ideal for laundering. The studios are being used to have girls online accepting a financed hand that uses ‘dirty’ money to buy the private time. The studio gets paid for the private session, the girl gets her (very small) part and so the money comes back clean,’ Mila says. As a result, ‘most Russian and Romanian studios are Mafia owned,’ a claim she extends to the wider developing world. The picture becomes clearer when you remember how scattered and obfuscated these networks’ financial structures are—it’d be easier to confusingly launder money through a company that’s somehow simultaneously based in both Hungary and Portugal.

The Eastern Bloc countries that so many cam girls call home are repeatedly mentioned in sex trafficking reports as both sources and conduits of illicit sex work—MyFreeCams has gone as far as banning all models from the Philippines, where conditions are said to be the most brutal.

The reasoning isn’t mentioned, but is easy to surmise. Moving the exploitation online, where girls are under ‘contract’ to stay in a room for half a day at a time with dubious legal recourse, makes criminal sense.

“Indentured Servitude, Money Laundering, and Piles of Money: The Crazy Secrets of Internet Cam Girls (NSFW).” — Sam Biddle, Gizmodo (with corrected link)

More from Gizmodo

“The Honor System.” — Chris Jones, Esquire

More by Jones

The reverend has a new primetime show, but remains a polarizing figure:

Sharpton has a long record of involvement in civil rights cases, but there are still those who want to remember him as the guy who defended Tawana Brawley, the teenage girl who claimed to be gang raped by a group of white men before a grand jury dismissed her claims as bogus and Sharpton was successfully sued for defamation. They want to remember him as the guy who said inflammatory things—the man who railed against ‘diamond merchants’ and an ‘apartheid ambulance’—during the Crown Heights riots. Last year, he penned an apology in The New York Daily News for his language during the riots, and for failing to pay more tribute to Yankel Rosenbaum, an Australian graduate student who was killed in what some Jews remember as the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in American history. ‘I said things growing up. I used to use the ‘N’ word. I used to talk street language about a lot of things that you just can’t do,’ he says. ‘And they’ll bring it back to haunt you.’

‘The other thing I’ve learned, when I’ve had to deal with things I’ve said 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the first thing you should say is, “I shouldn’t have said it,”’ he says. ‘You don’t justify something. If you said something that’s wrong or that was stated wrongly, say that. The public can accept a mistake. What they can’t accept is you digging in and it’s an obvious mistake.’

“Al Sharpton’s Got a Brand New Bag.” — Marin Cogan, GQ

More from GQ

Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife’”:

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, ‘Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?’

How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.’

“The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus.” — Ariel Sabar, Smithsonian magazine

More from Smithsonian magaazine

“The Lie Factory.” — Jill Lepore, New Yorker

See more by Lepore

A Longreads Member Exclusive: When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy

Our second Longreads members exclusive! Our latest exclusive comes from Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone whose work has been featured on Longreads quite a bit. She wrote our latest Longreads Member pick, “When Your Therapist Drives You Crazy,” in 2002 for Philadelphia Magazine. It’s about a woman who enters marriage counseling—but ends up consumed by something much bigger.

You can read an excerpt of our second exclusive here.

A look at WBUK, an organization created in the United Kingdom to provide support for whistleblowers who often lose their jobs, families, reputations and mental health witnessing illicit activity and going public:

Beyond them sit about two dozen people whose lives, like those of Foxley and Gardiner, have been transformed because they refused to look the other way. They have come together to create a network to offer advice, legal counsel and psychological care to future whistleblowers, as well as campaign for their shared cause. The anger, hurt and frustration of their debate makes evident that WBUK also serves as a support mechanism for its participants.

Ian Foxley compared the very first meeting of the group, in March 2011, to ‘the site of a plane crash where the survivors were just getting to grips with their own injuries and those of their fellow passengers’. But today, the room is more like the ward of a hospital, full of ‘doctors and patients’, as Foxley puts it. Which side you belong to is determined by how far you have progressed along the arc of the life of a whistleblower.

“The Whistleblowers Club.” — Carola Hoyos, Financial Times

More from Financial Times

An excerpt from Kriegel’s new book, on the fatal fight between Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and Duk-koo Kim, and 30 years later, how it changed both families: 

In early November, Young-mi found herself on a second-floor balcony at Incheon International Airport. In observing that ancient Asian prohibition against fighters taking lovers, she could not be seen with Duk-koo’s modest entourage, or by the gaggle of reporters following them as they boarded their flight to the United States for the Mancini fight. Her fiancé had made news with intemperate remarks that he would beat Mancini, that only one of them would return home alive.

‘Either he dies,’ Duk-koo said, ‘or I die.’

And now Young-mi was forced to watch without saying goodbye. She could not so much as wave. Even as tears streamed down her face, the dance had begun, the ballet of blood and light in her tummy. She was pregnant with Duk-koo’s son.

“A Step Back.” — Mark Kriegel, New York Times

More on boxing

Our fiction pick of the week, from Electric Literature: “Hello Everybody,” by A.M. Homes. (Thanks, Elliott Holt.)

See more Longreads fiction picks